You guys, there’s a TV show called The Vampire Diaries, adapted from a YA series of the same name. I have not read the books and therefore cannot comment, but the show is clearly trying to be the small-screen Twilight (smart move), no matter how hard they have to wrestle it into shape.
Basically, this preview clip is five minutes of comedy gold, is what I’m saying. Enjoy our pregnant pauses!
My favorite part: They go to high school inside the west wing of a Mondrian, for some reason.
I’m catching up on wordcount at the moment, so I’m not blogging as much as I’d like. When I’ve recovered from WisCon, expect some more of the Catherine Cookson Experience, a pile of Questionable Taste Theatres, and a response to Darin Bradley’s challenge.
In the meantime, mad respect to these dancers, who have better spacial memory than I ever will.
Even more respect to the dancers of the period, who did this dance in crowded, smoky rooms, basically in the dark (candles never give off more light than absolutely necessary, the bastards), forty pounds of embroidered clothing, shoes with no demarcated left and right, and the stench of unwashed humanity constantly crawling up their noses. Ah, romance!
So, the problem with a character like Sherlock Holmes is that you can, in theory, take any element of him and run with it until you have a two-hour movie. It’s just – it’s a plan. As evidenced above, it’s not a GOOD plan, but it’s a plan.
(Related: I didn’t remember that Sherlock Holmes dodged quite so many explosions. Learn something every day!)
Also, Rachel McAdams should be famous enough by now to be allowed to wear clothes in the preview, right?
It’s not even that I’m a purist – I thorougly enjoyed the remake with Rupert Everett and Ian Hart and Michael Fassbender and Perdita Weeks and Rachel Hurd-Wood in it. It was well-made, and it’s really useful for Awesome British Actor Camp bingo. But for real, even with all the liberties they took, there was not a lot of useless slow motion and running-from-explosions.
I know Guy Ritchie has a pretty small bag of tricks, but damn.
Generally my music-scene knowledge is limited to movie-soundtrack composers, songs I hear on TV, and bands that were around when I was thirteen (Roxette 4ever!). However, once in a while I will see someone and think, “I must find out about this person AT ONCE.”
Her name is Lady Gaga, and she kicks everyone’s ass in this room.
This girl is awesome-slash-nuts-slash-a-total-social-construct. Also, she’s a stalagmite.
Lady Gaga is a 22-year-old (!) pop star, who got her start writing songs for the Pussycat Dolls and Britney Spears at some obscene age like 13. She got her own recording contract, and now has a Haus of Gaga that she’s modeled after Warhol, where everything from production to fashion design is apparently churned out by magical underage pixies who know how to make stalagmites stick to dresses.
Also, her songs are genius. They may not be good from the perspective of enduring history, but these are precision-tuned electropop that is tested by scientists to make sure it bores its way directly into your brain and remains their until you drip blood out of your eye like in a J-horror.
She’s too raunchy at times for my taste (I’m eighty-five, I think everyone’s too raunchy), but I do like that she seems totally in control of her own image. Everything about her is patently, gloriously false; you know you’re never getting to “the real” because she never presents it. She presents bows made out of hair and huge Grace Jones shoulder pads and face armor and masks made out of mirrors. (And that’s just Tuesday.) She says things in interviews like, “You can’t have love and art,” which is sort of sweet coming from a 22-year-old. But when you’re wearing the enormous black patent shoulder pads, it probably behooves you to seem self-confident and world-weary.
To conclude: I am not sure I even like Lady Gaga, but I can appreciate someone whose entire life is performance art. Especially when they’re in bows-out-of-hair and leotards and huge hoods and nude fishnets and five-inch heels, and I’m at home in my pajamas.
A glimpse of her aesthetic: this song, Poker Face, is 90% word salad, 20% teal Grace Jones leotards, 30% face armor, and 10% Great Danes.
